As telecommunication technologies continue to advance, the sophistication of the customers of telecommunication services is increasing. The commercial sector has become reliant on the telecommunication service providers to supply call services (e.g., call centers, interactive voice response (IVR) platforms, etc.) with the flexibility to adapt to continually changing requirements. Sophisticated customers demand that they be given more control over their services, particularly with the prevalence of global networks (such as the Internet) to facility access to the necessary resources to self-manage the services. In addition, these customers require a wide range and robust set of features relating to the call services.
Conventionally, service providers offer managed telecommunication services to the customers, whereby call plan applications are created by the service provider based upon the requirements that is manually submitted by the customer. To create a call flow application in the conventional system, the service provider is faced with the daunting task of managing a series of manual processes and manual documents. A drawback of this traditional approach is that the approach is costly in terms of human resources. Another drawback is that this process is prone to errors and inaccuracies in implementing the requirements of the customer. These errors may also be introduced in the billing process, resulting in inaccurate billing of the customer. Yet another drawback of the conventional system is that delays and inefficiencies attend a manual process; that is, there is delay between submission of the call plan and deployment. Additionally, any testing and re-testing of the call plan application further adds to the delay. Conventional representations of call plans are not suitable for customer display, as the customer is unnecessarily exposed to too much implementation details. Additionally, conventional systems lack information (e.g., message text) that is needed by the customers. Conventional application profiles are text-based, free-format, making automated conversion into a graphical format unfeasible.
Therefore, there is a need for an automated approach to developing call plan applications. There is also a need to provide a graphical user interface (GUI) for development of the call plan applications. There is a further need to rapidly deploy the call plan applications on a real-time or near real-time basis. There is yet another need to provide an approach that minimizes errors in implementing customer requirements.